


the past as you left it

by fairygloss



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Multi, Ninja Politics, Or Is It?, but it will be cool!, no romance till later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-29 03:50:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21403726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairygloss/pseuds/fairygloss
Summary: "Part of him wonders if this is the afterlife, but Itachi can't think of anything merciful to grant him this. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe he’s supposed to wander this land, tormented by memories nobody else can recall. Maybe he’s supposed to look into his mother’s eyes and remember the feeling of her throat opening up under his hand, the hot spurt of blood that followed it.Or maybe this is changeable."
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	the past as you left it

Mornings were never something Itachi looked forward to. Since ANBU, all another day meant was another mission and another laborious round of paperwork. The prestige each confirmed kill granted the clan couldn’t force the pride he saw in his cousins and his teammates. Killing was a disgusting act, even if it was necessary. Even if he could make it clean. And back then he hadn’t had to kill hampered by constant fatigue. Back then, the poison in his lungs hadn’t spread to the rest of his body.

Now he wakes up groggy with the salt-iron tang of blood in his mouth. Movement is more difficult than it ever has been. His nerves are dangerously dulled. It’s a consequence of the pills and powders he takes, all which have the same goal, of prolonging. They move his death forward another hour, another day, another month, sometimes. The cost is numbness, coughing fits, too many close calls. Pulling himself out of bed to stagger to the sink is the hardest part. Today though, when his eyes open, Itachi feels well. His mouth is clean. He traces a finger along the bedspread and he can feel the cotton fibers. His limbs are light.

His senses are still dulled by sleep. They must be. The pain will catch up to him. He and Kisame are on a mission, somewhere, probably deep in Kirigakure. He probably needs more medicine. Kisame probably scouted out an inn for the two of them. Itachi’s condition must have been particularly bad. Not that Kisame would ever say that’s the cause. His little acts of mercy always accommodate for Itachi’s pride. Maybe he didn’t even bother with getting Itachi to spin a genjutsu. Maybe he snuck into a room and just killed the occupants. No. Kisame is brutal, but not sloppy. He probably made them diplomats, or brothers, or like that one time, husband and wife, when Kisame was being a stubborn shit. He can’t remember, but it makes sense. He can almost recall crawling under the covers.

The sun is warm and faintly pleasant on his upturned face. His body is wrapped in thin summer sheets. It must be a nice inn. He should tell Kisame to get up and shut the blinds so they can finish whatever they’re doing here. A ninja of caliber does not allow himself the luxury of lying in bed. He opens his eyes and gazes at the indistinct blurs walls have become. Except they aren’t. They don’t blur. For the first time in six years, Itachi is looking at a room in perfect clarity. 

The sun is filtering through the paper doors, casting the room in soft light. Itachi can pick out the individual lines in the tatami mats covering the floor. His body is sore, but not the soreness that signifies that his body is failing. It’s sore in the way that accompanies a good workout, or a difficult mission. He can smell the spring air flowing through the open window. Birds are chirping outside. The room is clean and familiar. Whoever created this genjutsu is a master, but Itachi is not one to pursue nostalgia. He prefers forgetting.

Itachi kicks off his covers and stands. He remains calm as he brings his hands together to form a seal, tiger, and sends a pulse of chakra coursing through his body. It should be enough to disrupt the illusion. What he expects to see are the pristine walls crumbling down and for reality to be left in their wake. 

But it’s off. The chakra that leaves his body is weak. Much weaker than it should be. The walls are resolute. He shouldn’t have to try again, but he brings his hands together. 

His second try is a disappointing echo of the first. He focuses on the well of chakra within him and pulls. Resorting to strategies like visualization isn’t something he’s had to do since he was a child. The ceiling beams creak. A fine layer of dust rises from the floor.

A voice calls, “Itachi?”

He knows that voice. His blood is burning in his veins.

This illusion, this place, is from a lifetime ago. Nobody should be able to recreate it. Neither Madara, nor Danzo, not even Kakashi knew the Uchiha compound like he did. The true memory of the Uchiha clan died with Itachi. It lives on only in fragments within the last living owners of the Sharingan. Sasuke was too young. He’d been without a working Sharingan when the compound was still occupied. When it wasn’t sullied by the murder of over fifty people. He didn’t know the details of their home like Itachi did, didn’t know the dog-shaped scuff on the tatami mat to the right of Itachi’s bed. He didn’t know the titles of all the books on Itachi’s shelf, he couldn’t have remembered the ever-present stack of dirty bowls always present in the corner of Itachi’s room. When he got home late from missions, he didn’t want to wake any of the aunts up for food. He’d creep into the kitchen and scrape up whatever was still on the stove. Sometimes, if he got back early enough, a few of the active Uchiha ninja would be training in the courtyard outside. Itachi would watch them silently from the kitchen, stirring his dinner absentmindedly. It would still be warm. Sometimes, when he got to his room, Sasuke would be fast asleep outside the door.

What could Sasuke even remember? Half-forgotten rituals and katon jutsus, the faces of cousins who ruffled his hair when he walked past. All these must have faded to ghosts according to the inevitable decline of memory. And of course. There’s no reason for Itachi to see this, to be here. He’s dead. Once by the consumption in his lungs, and then again by his own hand. 

The door in front of him slides open and his mother is standing in the space behind it. She’s the same as she was, in her house slippers, in her robe emblazoned with a faded Uchiha fan. He never thought he looked like her. They had the same dark hair, the same slim face, but her eyes were much kinder. “Itachi,” her hand is braced on the door. Her feet have not yet crossed the threshold to his room. “Are you alright? I felt your chakra.”

She looks puzzled. How could anyone recreate this? How could anyone know the exact shape of the wrinkle between her eyebrows, the smell of woodsmoke that followed her. She’s just as he was in all the memories he’s tried to lose.

Some panic must show in his eyes because she steps forward, delicately. Bizarrely, he thinks of a rainy afternoon he’d spent with Kisame. They’d been scouting some abandoned village in Amegakure, whose empty houses had splintered doors and broken windows. Kisame had found a dog. It was feral, it had been feral for a long time. Its ribs showed through its hide. Kisame had pulled some meat jerky from his pocket and torn it into scraps to lure the animal toward him, urging it in low, hushed tones. The meat had been so small in his hands. The dog had come closer. When he pet it, it did not bite him. But it shook under his touch.

Itachi can’t let her touch him, and he can’t bring himself to kill her for a second time. So he pushes the door outside open and runs as fast as he can force himself. If Mikoto- if his mother calls after him again, he doesn’t hear it.

He stops when the sounds of the compound are gone from his mind. Konoha’s forest is deep and dark and could swallow him for days if he wanted to do that. If he wanted to hide. He slumps against the gnarled root of a tree. His breath is hot and heavy in his throat. The exhaustion isn’t physical. He has the chakra reserves and the stamina to continue at the pace for hours. The stress he’s feeling is a problem of the mind. Emotional fatigue. He needs to collect himself. A response so rooted in emotion is one he should have outgrown. 

It takes a while to slow his heart rate. Itachi focuses on imagining his lungs inflating and deflating. He counts each breath as a one-two and gradually realigns himself into the icy calm he’s been pressed in for the past ten years.

Itachi is a dead man. What god would be merciful enough to grant him this? What great sage could have decided to pluck him out of time and place him here? Maybe that isn’t the point. It could be a punishment, to live through the death of the Uchiha clan, again, tormented by memories only he can recall. Maybe he’s supposed to look into his mother’s eyes and remember the feeling of her throat opening up under his hand and the hot spurt of blood that followed it. 

He doesn’t remember much of his second death. Or after it. He remembers Naruto’s speech and sliding his sword into Kabuto’s deformed chest, remembers Sasuke-  _ Sasuke _ , and emotion swells harshly in his chest, staring at him, lonely and lost. He remembers his paper-thin soul dissolving into the nighttime wind. He assumed what was after would be more nothingness. That was all Iachi could remember, of the gap between death and resurrection: and impenetrable dark that was both a color and a feeling. Edo Tensei was like waking up from a long and restless sleep. As if he’d been wrenched away from a dream he couldn’t remember, no matter how hard he tried. This couldn’t be a reward for killing someone as insignificant as Kabuto. Maybe it was real.

The thought summons a wave of nausea.

If he wants to entertain taking this seriously, he has to be certain that this isn’t a genjutsu. His eyes sting as he activates his Sharingan. His chakra surges and begins to drain and it’s more parasitic than usual. Greedier. But the world around him lights up. There’s no glow of a shinobi’s chakra nearby. All he can see are the jutsus rooted deep in the earth, the ones built to protect the village. A final line of defense. Is it possible someone has found a way to disable his Sharingan? Or disrupt it?

He’s intelligent enough not to bother trying chakra disruption again. Not after three sequential failures. He gropes along his thigh until he finds his kunai holster. If this is an illusion, its detail is hardly in the caster’s favor now. He removes a kunai, and he stabs it into his leg.

The pain is worse than he expected. It blossoms around the blade and shoots into the muscle. His abdominal muscles clench and adrenaline shoots through his limbs. His fingers are buzzing around the handle of the blade. The world around him remains unchanged so he pulls the kunai out and stabs himself again, deeper into the tender meat of his thigh, and twists. Pain is usually enough to break out of an especially tricky genjutsu. It should be enough. His muscle tears around the blade and a wet noise comes out. He thinks he feels it nick bone. It’s like getting the air kicked out of him. He can’t not double over and keen. Why is this so hard? He’s been through worse. Bile floods his mouth and dribbles onto his leg. The wound is pulsing in front of his eyes, and blood is falling out of it, seeping into his pants, and his hands are much, much smaller than they should be.

He’s an idiot. Itachi pulls out the kunai and wipes it on his pants. The sunlight filtering off the canopy bounces off the blade. He can see himself in it, see his cheeks, soft with youth and baby fat. There are only the barest beginnings of the severe furrows that start in from the corners of his eyes. It isn’t even the Mangekyou staring back at him, only two normal tomoe swirling lazily, dancing across his red iris. He’s a child. Barely twelve. No wonder his mother had recognized him and hadn’t raised the alarm, saying there was a strange, grown Uchiha in her child’s room. He tilts the blade and watches his reflection distort. 

The question still remains of what this is. Not a genjutsu. Hopefully not the afterlife. There’s a sound in the tree behind him, followed by the thud of feet hitting the forest floor. Itachi warily turns his head and grips his kunai tighter.

Shisui’s death was always clear in his memory, much more than the banalities of any yesterday. He could close his eyes in the middle of a meeting, a mission, wherever, and picture Shisui’s empty eye sockets, could recall the scuffing sound his sandals made when he stepped off of the cliff and out into empty air. The silence had been unreal after Itachi screamed. It was only punctuated by the splash of Shisui’s body hitting the Nanako. It was a very long fall for only ten seconds.

The Shisui standing right in front of him is very much alive and faintly puzzled as he takes in Itachi’s whirling Sharingan and his bloody leg. He’d been in the trees. How long had he been following? How long had he hidden himself?

“This is a surprise,” Dead pine needles crunch under Shisui’s feet as he steps delicately forward. “I didn’t expect you’d be back for at least another day. And I definitely thought I’d find you in bed, not hiding in the forest.” Another step follows. He’s telegraphing his movements so deliberately they’re agonizing to follow with the Sharingan.

When Itachi points his weapon at him, all Shisui does is fall still and become quiet. The wind whips between the two of them. The canopy can’t block it. Itachi can’t help but wonder- how many times has Shisui Uchiha considered the possibility of his cousin sliding a blade between his ribs? Maybe, this time, it’ll be Shisui’s fault he dies. He almost wants to laugh.

“Stay back,” Itachi says. It’s a warning. But it doesn’t come out like one. Everything here is too claustrophobic. Everything here reminds him of home. They played together in this forest. They practiced hopping between the branches. His mother called them little squirrels. He remembers the trees exactly as they are now, impossibly tall, impossibly high above them. It’s too much. Shisui is too much, here, alive with both of his eyes. Young, unbroken, undrowned, unburied. Independent of his will, Itachi’s hand is shaking.

Shisui’s Mangekyou whirls to life. Ever the prodigy. What a blessed time for the clan. Mangekyou at thirteen, and Itachi following in his footsteps. What does he see? Some malignant web of chakra binding a dead soul to the wrong body? A genjutsu so powerful even Itachi can’t detect it? Or possibly, maybe, Shisui won’t see anything at all.

“There’s nothing there, Itachi,” he says. He confirms Itachi’s fears. He’s going for militant and unbothered, the same facade he dons in front of the Hokage, the clan elders, the one he tried to hold up the night Danzo stole his eye. He cannot let Shisui step any closer. He can’t.

But because Shisui has always been remarkably adept at doing the exact opposite of what Itachi wants, he lunges forward anyways. In barely the space of a breath, he plucks the kunai out of Itachi’s hand. Itachi just stares at his now-empty hand. He’s viscerally aware of the closeness between the two of them, of the dry pressure of Shisui’s fingers against his hand.

“Itachi,” Shisui says, and reaches beneath his chin. He grabs it and tilts it up so Itachi can’t look away, can’t distance himself from the pinwheels in his eyes. He’s too hot, then desperately cold, all at once. His teeth are clattering. “Itachi, look at me.” How could he not? How could he not be pulled into the orbit of those red suns? “There’s nothing here, okay?” Shisui’s mouth is pulling down at one corner and his brows are knotting together. He was always expressive for an Uchiha. Emotional, Fugaku said. Which meant weak, “There’s nothing there. You’re fine, Itachi. You’re safe. You’re home.”

He would try to respond. He would, but his eyes are throbbing in their sockets, and the ache is travelling through his temples and deep into his brain. It’s like something is growing from them, driving down into his brain like an infection. His visual field is wavering, rippling, as if it’s a pool of water someone has thrown a stone into. Distantly, he can hear himself hyperventilating. 

Is he going mad? Is this madness? He thought he had gone mad before, for a while, before Kisame. When he was having nightmares every night. He should have buried these memories alive somewhere. He should have found a way to forget, forever. No matter the cost.

Shisui raises a hand. He can see that much through the distortions, and when Shisui’s thumb touches his cheek, his eyes clear. They still burn, but they clear. Shisui’s thumb is red, red with blood, and Itachi wants to cackle, to indulge in the laughability of it all. Mangekyou eyes for somebody who isn’t even dead yet.

“Gods,” Shisui says, awed, frightened, and before he can step away Itachi reaches out and touches a hand to Shisui’s face. He presses a thumb to the corner of his lips. Lets his cheek rest in his hands. He ignores Shisui’s shock, ignores everything but the emotion roiling in his belly. All he can see is the face of his best friend and those eyes.

“Kill me,” Itachi says. He’s not sure why. He doesn’t think it will solve anything. 

“Never. Don’t ever-” Shisui’s voice breaks. He grabs Itachi by the shoulders and gathers him in his arms and Itachi allows himself to rest his head in the crook of Itachi’s neck, to let the blood drip off of his cheeks and onto Shisui’s skin. “What happened to you?”

All Itachi can do is lean against Shisui. He’s so tired. He can barely move. Shisui nudges him with a shoulder and Itachi mumbles something. He doesn’t know what. It’s just random words, an automatic response. He hopes Shisui will have the decency to wipe away his bloody tears before taking him back to the compound.


End file.
